Revenue for Wikipedia
Wikipedia is the greatest knowledge resource on the Internet. It is a free encyclopedia created and overseen by the general public, which is to say, by the diverse community of Wikipedia's users and contributors, who number in the millions. Unlike most Internet giants, Wikipedia does not display advertisements. Instead it is paid for by a not-for-profit foundation that accepts donations from supporters. The Wikimedia Foundation enjoys a tax-exempt status as strictly a charitable organization. The problems of profit If the Wikimedia Foundation were to change its name to, let's say, the Wikimedia Enterprise and start demanding a fee-for-use or displaying advertisements or otherwise making money for its owners and investors, it would lose both its tax-exempt status and the charitable donations it now enjoys. Those two effects, alone, would be a calamity. But there would be a third effect, potentially even worse. What about the millions of past contributors who have given their efforts and their knowledge to Wikipedia for free over the past 13 years? Would they not then feel entitled to a share in the profit from what they themselves have created? A class-action suit on their behalf might destroy the new enterprise. So it cannot be done. Right? Well, not so fast. What cannot be done overnight can, perhaps, be done gradually, in an open, legal, fair-for-all manner that does not involve any sudden loss of status or donations. But how? Before saying how, let's look more closely at Wikipedia's founding principles. They are many in number, but, for our purposes, let's focus on only two of them. No advertising The lack of advertising revenue may be seen as a weakness by potential investors, but it is actually Wikipedia's greatest strength. The encyclopedia's articles are (almost) never cluttered with annoying pop-ups and distracting banners and sidebars, and, in large part because of this, users of Wikipedia have high confidence in the objectivity of information presented in articles written by collaborators who are many, diverse, and financially disinterested. Wikipedia aims at and usually achieves a balanced, easily verifiable presentation of objective truth because for each article the contributors interact with one another in an open forum attached to the article, and there they arrive over time at a consensus regarding everything in the article about which there is any disagreement among them. Because each section of each article is editable online, any reader can instantly join the community of contributors whenever something in an article appears to be mistaken, misleading or incomplete. This works! Skeptics have been proven wrong. Wikipedia is a resounding success. But it would not have worked if advertising had been the source of Wikipedia's revenue. Contributors to Wikipedia articles were volunteers who gave their knowledge freely to the encyclopedia without any financial compensation. If those articles had generated revenue for the Foundation from advertisers who made money because their ads appeared within, above or alongside the articles, objectivity would have been undermined. Unpaid contributors would have felt they were working, without pay, for the financial benefit of investors and advertisers, getting nothing in return themselves; and in most articles, particularly those about a profitable enterprise, or those on any subject related to such, the uncompensated contributors would tend to have been "crowded out" by persons who have a financial interest in what the articles say. No original research Early on, Wikipedia ran afoul of law pertaining to intellectual property, especially with regard to copyrighted images. It did not matter that users who uploaded images made no money. Whenever anyone distributes copyrighted material, even for free, without the permission of the copyright owner, they are doing harm to the owner and violating the law. Wikipedia addressed this problem by requiring copyright notifications on all images, and by not permitting any image to be displayed if the terms of the copyright requires monetary compensation to the owner. This problem, and its solution, are related to a second founding principle: Wikipedia presents only non-copyright able information that is generally known and widely accepted as true. In other words, Wikipedia only contains information that is out there "in the public domain." It is not a place for presenting original research, new discoveries, novel ideas or anything else that could be construed as being some author's intellectual property. Like the rule about no advertising, this "No original research" rule enhances the confidence that readers can have in the objectivity of articles. If someone does want to freely distribute his own intellectual creations, Wikipedia is not the place to do it. There are other places for that. Facebook is one; YouTube another. Unlike Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube get plenty of revenue from advertising, and they are even able to provide a source of revenue to those who post text, images and videos. There is no implication or pretense of objectivity at these Web sites. Everyone knows that what a user offers on these sites is the user's own particular views and creations. So, what can be changed? Those two founding principles of the encyclopedia cannot change. They are responsible, in large part, for Wikipedia having the value that it has, as a transparent, free, exceptionally reliable encyclopedia of human knowledge. But they are not the only things that give Wikipedia its value. Wikipedia runs on MediaWiki software and is owned by the Foundation whose employees maintain it (though they do not supply its content). Without these things, too, there would be no Wikipedia. Mediawiki software has many other potential applications, and can be licensed for commercial use. This use of it right here, for example, by Wikia, is a commercial application. And even with regard to Wikipedia, the MediaWiki software has essential components that are not part of the encyclopedia. Pages reside in what are called MediaWiki "namespaces." Pages that display encyclopedia articles reside in the main namespace. Other namespaces, however, have pages that underpin the encyclopedia but are not part of the encyclopedia. These include the Talk namespace, for example, where collaborators discuss the content of articles, and the User namespace, where contributors can display information about themselves. Not all of the founding principles of Wikipedia ever applied to these other namespaces. For example, one of Wikipedia's principles is called Neutral point of view. Contributors are expected not to argue for their own viewpoint on contentious issues within the body of articles in the main namespace, but instead to impartially represent both sides of any controversy. This does not apply and never applied, however, to the Talk namespace, where contributors are expected and encouraged to debate those issues, each contributor presenting his own arguments, until a consensus is reached. Another example is the guideline about Notability. As an encyclopedia of generally accepted, easily verifiable human knowledge, articles in Wikipedia should only be created for "notable subjects," meaning subjects about which there is significant readily accessible coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject itself. Obviously, this does not apply to the User namespace! Pages in the User namespace display information about the contributors to Wikipedia, and very few of those, if any, are notable subjects. Nonetheless, the two founding principles discussed above, no advertising and no original content, applied from the beginning and still apply today to all namespaces, despite the fact that only the main namespace is the encyclopedia. This, perhaps, can be changed over time, in a gradual way that A) will not immediately affect the tax-exempt status of the Foundation and B) involves steps that ought to be taken anyway, independent of any prospect for profitability in the future. The process A namespace name change The first step is to rename one of the namespaces, changing User to Author. That's a better name anyway. Users of Wikipedia are mostly casual readers and working researchers who are not themselves contributors to Wikipedia. So they do not have pages describing themselves in the User namespace. User pages are only created when someone logs in and contributes some content to Wikipedia under a unique real or assumed identity, not just as an anonymous IP address. Contributor would seem to be an even better name than Author, given that Wikipedia articles do not really have authors, only contributors. But there are other reasons to go with Author, as will be apparent very soon. And it's a far better name than User in any case. Acknowledge and allow original content in the Author namespace Users frequently have sandboxes and a variety of other subpages under their user pages, and these typically display original, non-encyclopedic content. Meanwhile, students and professional researchers around the world use Wikipedia as a research tool, citing and linking to Wikipedia articles in their papers online. Wouldn't it be nice if a researcher could simply use the Author namespace and the link/format/collaboration tools of Wikipedia's Mediawiki software in the development and the presentation of such a paper? Well, no, not now. There are at least a couple reasons why that would not be advisable for the researcher, nor desirable for the Wikimedia Foundation. It's true that collaboration and linking would be made easy, but no researcher (or team of researchers, assistants and collaborators) would want to expose early drafts to inspection by outsiders. And the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wikipedia itself, would be seen as associated with